at the intersection of philosophy, technology and business

Unsolicited Bug Report

I love the HopStop app for getting around the NYC subway and bus system. Especially the new “SmartTrip” feature.

But there’s a bugaboo they haven’t fixed – and I do this almost every time I use the app.

1. Tap the field for “Destination” and type the address I want to go to.
2. Tap the big enticing “Go” button.
3. Ooops! There’s the annoying “Please enter a start address.” popup because I didn’t happen to remember to tap the “current location” first in the From field.
4. Tap OK to make the annoying box go away.
5. Stab around randomly at the screen to try to figure out how to get back to the initial screen.
6. Now I have some random address in my destination field, and the app didn’t even save my carefully typed address.

I think what happens is the popup in step #3 and #4 interrupts my flow and makes me shift contexts. My goal, previously to enter an address and get directions, is now to go back and click the “Current location” button on the home screen. At this point my brain forgets that the “return” button has a navigation function, it disappears into the keyboard; often I click Go again and get the popup back and that’s frustrating, so I click on the blank area near one of the cached addresses (hence the “some random address”) or the clear X button underneath the “Go” button (hence the “didn’t save my carefully typed address.”)

Now that I’ve over-analyzed my behavior, I expect I’ll have little trouble remembering to tap the “return” button in the future.

I don’t have the UX chops to know whether this is likely to be a common confusion or just something odd about my own experiences and expectations.

This might be solved by replacing the “Please enter a start address.” with a “Do you want to start from your current location?” prompt; or even just assuming that I want to start from my location if I didn’t put one in.